The te'amim and the cantillation of the biblical text

The te'amim ("accents" or "notes") are the Masoretic signs that indicate at once the musical cantillation, the stress and the syntactic punctuation of the biblical text. Divided into disjunctive and conjunctive, they structure verses into units of meaning and guide public reading. The melodies attached to these signs vary by Ashkenazi, Sephardi and Eastern traditions.